Chapter 25: Original Story

Chapter 25: Chapter 25: Original Story

Azura took a deep breath and tried again, this time layering her voice with the sweet, patient tone of a kindergarten teacher dealing with a particularly skittish child.

"Selena, open the door. I didn’t come here just to check on you—I also brought something you dropped yesterday."

Silence.

Azura waited. One minute. Two minutes. Three minutes.

She tapped her foot.

Four minutes. Five minutes.

The door remained stubbornly closed, like a teenager refusing to come out of their room after being asked to do chores.

Azura’s eye twitched. Her first instinct was to channel her inner action hero and deliver a spectacular flying kick to the door. But then she looked down at her leg, then at the door, then back at her leg. She had no idea what this body’s kicking power was.

What if I kick it and break my foot instead? Then I’d have to hopping around with a broken foot and explain to Jonathan that I lost a fight with a door.

No. She needed a different approach.

She cleared her throat and adopted the sweetest, most coaxing voice she could muster—like a witch offering a perfectly polished apple to a very suspicious Snow White.

"Selena~ don’t be afraid of me~ if you open the door, you’ll see I’m serious~ just look at what I brought for you~"

Five more minutes passed.

Nothing.

Azura’s patience evaporated like water on a hot skillet.

She slumped against the wall beside the door, her last shred of dignity crumbling. She was bored. Frustrated. And frankly, a little offended that Selena thought she was capable of murder.

And then, an idea struck her.

A terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad idea.

She opened her mouth and began to sing.

A Chinese heartbreak song. At full volume. Completely off-key.

"~Ni shuo ni ai wo~ que yi zhi bu shuo~ rang wo zai yuan di deng ni deng dao xin dou po sui~"

The melody was supposed to be melancholic. Soulful. The kind of song that made you stare out a rainy window and think about lost love.

Instead, what came out of Azura’s mouth sounded like a dying seal being chased by a very angry whale while simultaneously stepping on a cat’s tail.

Inside the room, Selena was curled up on her bed, trembling, convinced that Azura had come to finish her off. She was mentally preparing her final words when—

A sound pierced through the door.

It was... singing? In Chinese?

Selena’s brain short-circuited. Since when does Azura know Chinese?

But that thought lasted exactly 0.1 seconds, because the next 0.1 seconds brought the full force of Azura’s singing crashing into her eardrums like a freight train made of nails on a chalkboard.

Her soul left her body. Her ancestors wept. Somewhere in the distance, a flower wilted.

It was worse than Doraemon and Nobita being forced to listen to Gian’s singing. It was worse than that one time in the anime where everyone’s faces melted from the sheer horror of bad vocals.

Selena clamped her hands over her ears. Her face contorted in agony.

Four minutes.

Four agonizing minutes of Azura warbling off-key Chinese into the hallway like a banshee having an existential crisis.

Selena couldn’t take it anymore. She lunged at the door, wrenched it open just a crack. Just enough to reveal half her face—one wide, traumatized eye staring at Azura like she was looking at a horror clown.

"Can you STOP?!" Selena’s voice was strained. "Is this another way you’re bullying me?! Or is this—" she swallowed hard, "—a provocation?! To get revenge for last night?!"

Azura’s singing stopped immediately. Her face lit up with a triumphant grin—until Selena’s words registered.

Her grin melted into confusion.

"Revenge? Last night?" She tilted her head. "What do you mean? Did you do something wrong to me?"

Selena’s eye—the only one visible through the crack in the door—widened like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming truck.

"Do you... really not know what happened last night?"

Azura’s patience snapped like a rubber band stretched too many times. She threw her hands up in the air, her voice rising to a near-shriek.

"WHAT EXACTLY HAPPENED?! TELL ME! Why are you AND Jonathan both speaking in cryptic riddles today like we’re in some kind of fantasy mystery novel?! Is this a family tradition I missed?! Do I need to solve a riddle from a talking owl to get answers?!"

She was practically vibrating with frustration. Her own siblings were treating her like she was supposed to be a mind reader, and she was this close to flipping a table—if there was a table nearby.

Selena’s expression shifted. It was complicated. Pitying. Slightly guilty.

The truth was, Azura had unknowingly bulldozed the original plot into a ditch.

In the original story, last night was supposed to be a pivotal moment. "Azura" was supposed to accompany Adrian, Jonathan, and Vincent for the border investigation. It was a major plot point. A canon event. The kind of Chapter that readers would bookmark and reread.

But Azura—who knew nothing about this novel except for the extremely questionable erotic Chapters she’d skimmed—had completely missed that memo.

When a group of rogues ambushed their group at the border, Adrian fought like a beast—killed several of them. Who would have expected, before the last one died, for him to throw a pouch filled with some kind of aphrodisiac powder in Adrian’s face—something designed to trigger an uncontrollable mating heat?

In the original one, Adrian would have slept with "Azura" that night.

Meanwhile, the three Alpha triplets, unable to find "Azura" at home, would follow their fated mate bond straight to the house pack, where they’d find Selena, kidnap her, and drag her back to their territory.

However because Azura had been busy chasing Selena like a deranged stalker, then gone home and passed out like a log, everything went off the rails like a train that decided to take a scenic detour through a clown convention.

The triplets? They ended up traumatized by a naked, sleep-talking Azura, even now they thought she was their fated mate.

As for Adrian...

Without Azura there to be his convenient heat-solution, Jonathan and Vincent had to drag his burning, half-conscious body back to the pack house. They tried to call for the private healer.

But here’s the thing.

Even though Adrian had already rejected Selena, the fated bond between them wasn’t completely severed. It was still there. Faint. Thrumming. Like a loose thread waiting to be pulled.

And in his feverish, drugged state, Adrian’s instincts took over. He broke free. Ran. Stumbled through the hallways like a man possessed.

Straight to Selena’s room.

And well...

The sounds that came from that room last night were not the sounds of two people having a polite tea party. Moans. Groans. The creaking of furniture. A headboard hitting the wall with rhythmic determination.

Jonathan and Vincent had tried their best to cover it up, but between the other maids and the guards, the news had spread faster than wildfire in a dry forest.

Which was why everyone—Lyra, the maids, the guards, even Mrs. Hannah—kept looking at Azura with those pitying eyes.

They all thought Azura was still desperately in love with Adrian, pining to be his future Luna.

They thought her heart had been shattered into a thousand pieces.

Meanwhile, Azura was standing here, completely oblivious, wondering why everyone was acting like she was a terminally ill patient.

Selena finally spoke, her voice careful and hesitant. "You... you really don’t know about me and Alpha Adrian?"